Venice Biennale 2017 part 2 Relational Practices

As I mentioned in my last post there were several performative and community related practices presented at the Biennale. The first one I came across in the Arsenale was the Planetary Dance by Anna Halprin. Her ‘Planetary Dance’ rituals were presented to the audience as a large wall drawing, consisting of explanatory diagrams with accompanying text; you were asked to work your way through and link to the photographs of activities that ran in a line horizontally close to the bottom edge of the work.

Halprin offered us a chance to help heal the world by joining its peoples together in a healing set of dances.  Dance diagrams and ritual dance moves were set out over the wall surface. These had been designed on a computer and printed out on vinyl, giving the work a ‘professional’ graphic designed feel, that I presumed was chosen to give visual clarity and explain the dances set out in the row of photographs below.

Anna Halprin

I was interested in the how the conventions of information graphics had been appropriated and synthesised with some of the conventions of what I thought looked like Najavo Indian symbolism.

Navajo symbols

Navajo sand drawing

Anna Halprin is known as a choreographer, so I presume her images are rooted in traditions of dance notation.

Ballroom Dance notation

Baroque Dance notation

Once again we have drawing filling a gap between complex alternative forms of communication; as information graphics, as diagrams that can be followed, as symbolic form and as an aesthetic that is informed by other disciplines.

Anna Halprin: Planetary Dance

The actual work is of course a performance, what you see in the biennale is a document of practice, (a video of the event was showing in another room), and how artists document practice is becoming more and more important. As performative work is integrated into contemporary fine art relational practice, it is in cooperation with its documention that it will be critiqued and this is as much lens based, as in sound recordings, in written records, as in observational drawings or diagrams.

The Crossroads Project

Bonnie Ora Sherk's the Crossroads and Living Library projects offered an alternative vision, one that demonstrated how a long-term commitment to local organisation can bring rich benefits.  Maps and plans as well as diagrams of educational resources were alongside photographs and videos, used to communicate the effectiveness of the work done.  It’s interesting to see work of this sort displayed on the walls alongside more traditional ‘aesthetic’ pieces. It can be hard to read at first, as you tend to be tuned into the ‘look’ of art and have to take a step back and think about how this would work in a community setting. The ‘evidence’ is often grouped together, framed to allow for the fact that this is after all a biennale and not the walls of a local community centre, (which I did find somewhat awkward as I felt it was a bit of a compromise, for instance some work was put up very high so it become impossible to read), but on the other hand I presume the curators had to think about how to give ‘honorific’ value to work that is often overlooked.

Crossroads project: exhibition view

Again we have the issue of art as documentation. Relational practices have allowed what we would have called 'community art' 20 years ago, to now be included within the broad lexicon of contemporary art practice. However when presented within something as prestigious as the Venice Biennale a certain formalism and nod to contemporary exhibition practices is apparent. What was interesting from a drawing perspective however was the role of mapping and diagrams, as ways to communicate these practices.

Crossroads project: map

Living Library: diagram

As with Anna Halprin's project you get a sense that other professionals need to get involved such as information graphics experts or graphic designers, photographers or video makers, if the work is to be communicated at its fullest potential. This type of work can tend to be octopus like in its various manifestations, and involve various and complex groups of people as both particants and audiences but both projects were presented as by named artists, Bonnie Ora Sherk and Anna Halprin, so perhaps I need to go back to Bourriaud's definition of relational practice as "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space." The artist is now the "catalyst", rather than the producer of 'signature' works. (See Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics p.113 ) Perhaps the key issue with both these projects is that they are long term and involve a great deal of trust on the part of the other people joining in.

The Play

There was a fascinating section depicting ‘voyages’ and street actions by the ever-evolving Japanese performance collective 'The Play', who have been active since 1967 and whose work blends avant-garde theatre with social criticism. On the side of the canal was erected what was a floating playhouse and inside was a range of documents, that again included maps and diagrams of the events.

The Play: map of the river voyage

The Play: Map of voyage and Play symbol

Using a similar wall display to Bonnie Ora Sherk's, there was an integration of diagrams and photographs on the Play's exhibition, this time however the diagrams were much more sophisticated and seemed to have played a much bigger part in the group's communication and audience development strategy.

Shimabuku's sharpened Macbook Air

Shimabuku's 'Sharpened Macbook Air' was at the centre of an installation designed to make the audience replay in their heads the events that the artist had set up in order to realise his ideas. For instance participants in one performance were asked if they would swap their mobile phone for a stone axe, the exhibition had display cases of axes and phones that had been swapped.

Shimabuku: exhibition display case

Shimabuku: performance literature, including map

Again the importance of documentation was raised, Shimabuku had had made accompanying literature outlining the projects and this had an annotated map showing readers where events would take place.
Shimabuku's exhibition presentation was typical of several practices that overlap performance, installation, object making, video production etc. etc. Drawing is simply one aspect of a way of working that is ideas driven and much more related to the history of conceptual art practice rather than community art, but because both types of practice have to rely on documentation superficially they can come across as being similar, which is why I think presentation is so important.
The artist as "catalyst", is all very well, but we are all in many ways "catalysts", having to perform a variety of roles in relation to any art practice, no matter how focused it is on individual production. As soon as the work leaves the studio, a raft of decisions come into play, including negotiating with curators, technicians and audiences. Whilst work is in production a wide range of social interactions will also take place which will be affecting what the final result will be.

As you can see from the diagram above there are aspects of relational practice in all art practices and drawing, like writing can help to communicate this. As I pointed out in the last post, Erwin Wurm was for me a sort of focus against which I could measure what was happening, and in this post I have tried to look at some aspects of more performative or communal engagement, but Wurm's work is also in some ways very traditional, and it relies on an audience's awareness of all the old codes of reading sculpture as an object. The next post will therefore try and pick a way through what could be seen as more traditional work.